The images become palimpsests: we see the present invaded by the skeletal forms of the past, in a silent, uncanny testimony to what is inevitalby lost and supplanted in the endless process of urban redevelopment. The 800-year-old city of Liverpool is changing so rapidly that time itself seems distorted, compressed. The city’s buildings – some of them barely a generation old – vanish overnight, and as the sun rises new structures emerge from the dust of demolition. These occasions of erasure and re-inscription, palimpsests of the urban landscape, are the subject of Carlos Garaicoa’s project. In the summer of 2006 Garaicoa made a series of topographical photographs which, in the finished work, find themselves invaded by alien, skeletal structures – the ghostly forms of buildings past. Working from archival images, Garaicoa has made CAD drawings of these lost buildings and, using coloured thread, stitched them to the surface of his photographs. The resulting works are charged, self-divided objects in which disparate materials and languages overlap and interpenetrate. The smooth, technocratic space of the record photograph is prised open by Garaicoa’s spectral interventions, which adapt themselves, parasitically, to the perspective of the scene. Garaicoa exaggerates and undermines the photograph’s vanitas qualities, its poetics of what has been. He invites us to mourn what is lost without forgetting the social, economic and political shifts that underpin the ongoing transformation of the city. Patrick Henry

Project Credits Supported by Virgin Atlantic